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Color CRTs have 3 electron beams that scan across the backside of the screen, varying in intensity in accordance with the red, green, and blue video signals. The backside of the screen is printed with a pattern of phosphor dots which emit red, green, and blue light when struck by the beam. There is a shadow mask (metal plate with holes) or aperture grille (screen of fine metal wires) between the electron guns and the screen that blocks shades the phosphors from the beams so that each electron beam can only strike phosphors of the correct color.

The dot pitch is the physical distance between two phosphor dots of the same color.

The color signals are continuous analog signals, and are accompanied by a horizontal sync signal, which controls how quickly the electron beams sweep horizontally across the screen and back to the other side. To display a single frame, the beams must sweep once from top to bottom, and (vertical resolution ) times from side to side. For common resolutions, this means the horizontal sync frequency is on the order of 50-250 kHz.

Pertinent facts:

The electron guns are usually focused such that they illuminate more than one phosphor dot at once. Following the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, this is necessary to avoid aliasing. In this particular case, aliasling makes the image look grainy or speckled. This is the symptom of "too small focus".

The circuitry in the monitor uses the horizontal and vertical sync signals to regenerate ramp wavefroms that control the (x,y) position of the electron beams. If the (horizontal) sync frequency is too high, the monitor may be "unable to sync".

The higher the resolution, the faster the electron beams have to move in order to draw all the pixels in time. This means that the red, green, and blue signals vary at higher frequency.

The result is that there are four ways for a monitor to fail to display a useful image at a particular resolution:

Dot pitch too low. There simply aren't enough colored dots on the screen to properly represent the logical pixels in the video signal.

Focus too large. Although the dot pitch is sufficient, the focus spot is just too big. This results in a blurry image. The spatial position of pixels is more accurate than running the monitor at a lower resolution, but unless the display system in the computer can be convinced to limit the amount of detail it tries to display (say, through a PPI option or a good resampler), the image will look worse. This can be fixed if the dot pitch is sufficient and you can adjust the focus.

Insufficient bandwidth in video amplifiers. As stated above, higher resolutions mean higher frequency RGB video signals. If the amplifiers in the monitor have insufficient bandwidth to pass these high frequencies largely unchanged, the image will also be blurred (but only horizontally). It may be possible to trade resolution for flicker by decreasing the refresh rate (and thus the video bandwidth). It might also help to reduce the vertical blanking interval (deep video driver/X11 modeline voodoo).

The monitor simply refuses to sync at that high a resolution. This is usually for self protection (the video amplifiers draw more power and get hotter when forced to pass higher frequencies). It may be possible to trade resolution for flicker by decreasing the refresh rate (and thus the video bandwidth).

Lost some IQ reading that article. Just link to wikipedia or something. Don't need that guy's life story, how he felt about the problem, and his inferred understanding of the problem. Then he goes on to complain his TV has too many configurable options that he doesn't understand. fun fun

In general their maximum resolution was higher than a TFT panel, but CRT screens had dynamic resolutions: unlike LCD where the image looked best when the screen was run at native resolution, CRTs looked 'right' at whatever resolution they were run at. And most people chose to run their screens at low resolutions.

Agreed on apple and corporate PCs. However there's a huge difference: apple computers hold their value extremely well, to the point that I can't pay someone to take a 10 year old PC laptop but old powerbook G4s still go for $100+ on ebay. Corporate PCs on the other hand plummet in value just as much (if not more, %wise) as consumer PCs. The laptop I'm using right now cost about $3000 in 07 or 08 and has pretty decent specs even by today's standards (core 2 duo @2.5, 4GB ram, nvidia gpu), not to mention good build quality and a fucking 1920x1200 screen, and only cost me $250 on ebay

I actually recommend buying used workstation class computers to people all the time, as they can be much cheaper than similarly spec'd consumer stuff.

Oh, I wasn't implying that you should buy apple based on that. Quite the opposite really. My stance on apple computers is pretty much "if I have $1500 to throw away on a laptop a macbook is not a bad choice"

300x250 would not occupy the majority of the screen on the left. It's obviously a windows-based machine and therefore running at 640x480 at the very least, and so a 300x250 would still be taking only a quarter of the screen, if not less given the machine looks like it's running 1024x768.

OP's point is even more pertinent to smart phones. The iPhone 5's display is 326 ppi, meaning OP's hypothetical image would appear 0.92" wide (23.4 mm). The Galaxy S3 is 306 ppi, which still puts the image under an inch wide.

I'll grant you OP's hyperbole though, but I don't think the problem is exaggerated so much as misrepresented. Image size isn't really the problem — people with eyesight too poor for their pixel density can always zoom in.

At least on iOS devices (and I'm guessing any other device with such high pixel density), the "viewport" resolution is not the same as the display resolution. The size of stuff on the screen is the same as if the display had 1/2 as many pixels in each direction (so everything is the same size between iPhone 3G and iPhone 4). The difference is that everything can be more detailed, if that detail is available (e.g. photos that have been scaled down to fit can be displayed with twice as many pixels, text and graphics are smoother, etc).

Not the same at all. Often you can find a higher resolution image by doing a quick search before you post or if it's OC you can make a little effort to make sure it's high res. Rarely can you find a NSFW version of what you're about to post.

You also can't filter posts by resolution, but you can easily filter for NSFW.

Day 112: After weeks traversing the desolate, pixel-strewn landscape of Reddit, I finally spotted signs of life. Hopefully this is a sign that they've realized I'm here, and are attempting to open a line of communication. I'm not sure how much longer I can continue like this.

I actually think some people are unable to distinguish high res from low res. You would think having a stretched, pixilated, and barely distinguishable as a wallpaper would drive anyone crazy but you'd be surprised at how many people say "look at my cool new wallpaper."

I have 1920x1080 resolution on my 15" laptop. I've increased DPI in Windows though and I increase every page size because of bad vision. (FYI it's lenovo Y580, really good laptop and my primary gaming machine)

And don't forget zooming out (Ctrl+- or Ctrl+mouse wheel scroll down). If an image is too large for someone's screen, downsampling it to fit will always yield sharper results than zooming in, and most browsers will fit the image for you, saving you the trouble.

This one of my pet peeves about Reddit. People post all these awesome photos that they've taken from all over the world, I'd love to use it as wallpaper and they post it at less than 800x600. What a total waste of time and bandwidth. Please people! Post high res images if you are going to post something nice.

As a former it technician, a customer asked me to fix her ejaculation... She ment resolution but in Swedish, these words are a bit simular. Utlösning=ejaculation and upplösning=resolution. I told her that she should talk to her husband about it... The next day she got red as a stop sign when I walked by.